Movie Review - Feast (2005)

I received a copy of this film from my fellow horrorhound, Count Dante. He was surprised I hadn't seen it yet and, truthfully, I'm surprised I hadn't either. I remembered hearing good things about it when it first came out, but it somehow managed to slipped under my radar.

Boy! Was I negligent or what?!?

Feast, in a word, is fucking awesome. It is a horror movie that does what I wished so many low budget films did more often;, namely, throw the old conventions and cliches out the window...

The third and final installment in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's Project Greenlight series, this film was directed by John Gulager. His father, famed horror and b-movie actor Clu Gulager (Burt, from Return of the Living Dead), plays one of the characters and is part of an ensemble cast that does a great job with the script and the overwhelmingly frantic pace of the film's action and terror.

The story revolves around a group of feckless losers all hanging around a desert bar on one lonely night. Their night and plans of drunken idiocy are interrupted when two characters called The Hero (Eric Dane),and the Heroine (Navi Rawat) arrive with several gruesome, filthy, ravenous monsters hot on their tails. The poor denizens of the bar spend the rest of the movie fighting to stay alive.



From the opening scene, this movie is relentless, offensive, gory, and overwhelming in its violence... and Doctor Zombie would have it no other way. This movie has everything a horror fan could dream of from gore to horror to humor to Henry Rollins. That's right... Henry Fucking Rollins. And Rollins plays one of his best roles yet... a nebbish traveling salesman who spouts self help and inspirational mantras like Al Franken's titular character, Stewart.



Also add Jason Mewes to the mix and you've got some cameo casting that can't be beat.

The writers, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, wrote a masterpiece here. They took the tired genre staple of a group of people trapped and fighting an unknown evil, and made it fresh. They also blatantly took the conventions to task. In fact, most of th characters don't even have names. They are known simply by their archetypes. Rollins plays Coach. We have the Hero and the Heroine. We have Beer Guy, Bozo, Tuffy, Bartender, and The Veteran. It's almost as though the writers did this in order to say, "Don't even bother to learn their names, because they most likely won't be around long enough for you to attach yourself to any of them anyway."

The blood is awesome (no poorly rendered CGI here!) and there's buckets of the stuff. Barrels of the old red. Christ, there's swimming pools of it! The monsters are great and add the perfect mix of terror and humor to the situation. As I said before, no depravity is left unturned. The monsters are hungry, dangerous, insane, and remarkably lusty. One particular scene stands out - a smaller, immature monster gets into the bar and tears the face off of a patron. Not satisfied with having killed the poor person, the little filthy beast then proceeds to hump the face hole in full view of the remaining survivors.



That's the kind of dark, evil, and decidedly hilarious stuff that you won't see at a PG-13 showing of Prom Night. Hell, if some shaggy, toothy beast shagged Paris Hilton in Wax Works, I might have actually seen it. But no, it (I'll just have to settle for the poorly filmed One Night In Paris for that, talk about TRUE HORROR! But I digress...)

This is the sort of movie that Hollywood needs to do when they're looking to add to the horror genre. Enough with the shitty remakes of classic horror films, enough PG-13 crap, and enough Japanese ghost stories that aren't scary to the average, jaded American horror fan. Of course, the nature of this film's production gave it something of an advantage, and the fact that Affleck and Damon chose it for Project Greenlight is a testament to how cool they, and the idea of Project Greenlight, truly were.

Simply put, this is the sort of movie that would send the morons who run the MPAA screaming into the night, clawing at their eyes in an attempt to punish the soft orbs for subjecting them to such depravity.

And that fucking rocks.

You must see this film! Words can't describe the awesome!

DOCTOR ZOMBIE'S RATING: 5 out of 5 Chomped Brains!!!